Lin-Manuel Miranda marries improv and hip-hop in ‘Freestyle Love Supreme’

Freestyle Love Supreme is an improv rap show even Tipper Gore and C. Delores Tucker could enjoy.

Its presence on Broadway is yet another indication of hip-hop’s continued evolution from its birth in the black-and-brown South Bronx of the early ’70s to now. And so, just as one can now buy a Dapper Dan creation from Gucci itself, one can also attend a rap-flavored improv show on Broadway for about $60 to $200, depending on where you’re sitting. Which means that, in the ever-expanding tent of hip-hop, there’s even room for a famously squeamish former second lady.

The Broadway show, now running through Jan. 5 at the Booth Theatre in New York, is akin to a marriage of Wild ’N Out, Nick Cannon’s popular MTV show, and Whose Line Is It Anyway? presented as live theater. Before he found success with Hamilton and In the Heights, Miranda co-created Freestyle Love Supreme with his buddies, Hamilton director Thomas Kail and actor Anthony Veneziale.

Some background: In 1985, Gore, future second lady, testified before a Senate panel, advocating for warning labels on music after she bought a Prince album for her daughter, who was 11 at the time, and realized that it was inappropriate for her. Gore then went on a crusade on behalf of the Parents Music Resource Center that resulted in the “parental advisory” sticker that accompanies music with explicit lyrics. Similarly, in the early ’90s, Tucker was a vocal opponent of gangsta rap (especially Tupac Shakur’s) and organized rallies outside of music stores, protesting the violent and misogynistic lyrics that characterized the genre.

Like every improv show, Freestyle Love Supreme is dependent on audience energy and participation and therefore is heavily dependent on the weirdo quotient of its ticket buyers. Before the show starts, attendees are encouraged to write down words and put them in a box for performers to use as prompts in the show, though yelling them out is also encouraged.

The show is structured around a few set pieces: The rappers introduce themselves and show off their individual talents. A regular rotating cast of rappers and beatboxers (Utkarsh Ambudkar, aka UTK the INC.; Andrew Bancroft, aka Jelly Donut; Aneesa Folds, aka Young Nees; Arthur Lewis, aka Arthur the Geniuses; Kaila Mullady, aka Kaiser Rözé; Chris and Sullivan, aka Shockwave) participate, with surprise guests rounding out the lineup. Veneziale, aka Two Touch, serves as MC. Veneziale is an amenable host, and Ambudkar is by far the most skilled rapper of the group, while Folds, the newest member, who rose through the Freestyle Love Supreme academy, offers a powerfully impressive singing voice besides her rapping.

They invite the audience to share stories about moments in their lives they wish they could revise, and, to close out the show, they invite an audience member to sit onstage and be interviewed about his or her day. To be selected, the person must be of voting age, must have interacted with at least three to five people, and must have actually done something that day, as the life of an agoraphobe does not lend itself to interesting freestyles — whouda thunk?!

The nights I attended, the guests were Miranda, Daveed Diggs (best known for originating the role of Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette in Hamilton) and Whose Line alum Wayne Brady. Both nights I attended Freestyle Love Supreme, there were middle-school-age children in the audience, and for the most part, the rappers steer clear of subjects and words that would likely rile Tucker or Gore. Miranda took the liberty of dropping a generous supply of F-bombs, but he seemed to be the exception in that regard. It didn’t matter — when he hopped out of the wings, Miranda was greeted with the sort of roars, whoops and applause one might expect for a star quarterback making his entrance at the Super Bowl, not a musical theater nerd. But then, in this arena, Miranda is the Puerto Rican Johnny Unitas.

The first night I attended included a rap, drawn from an audience member’s recounting of biting her sister on the back during a visit to their grandparents’ home in Connecticut. The audience member was 3 years old at the time; her sister was 1. At the second performance, an elderly woman in the audience shared a story about having her picture taken, without her consent, as she was walking through a park. Later, she discovered that her head ended up in an issue of Playboy grafted onto someone else’s body.

And so Freestyle Love Supreme is about as anodyne a rap show as one can attend that isn’t a stop on the world tour of KIDZ BOP. It doesn’t exhibit much relationship to the John Coltrane album that inspired its name, but it does thrives on linguistic cleverness. A standout prompt was one that required the performers to tell a true story using the word “meniscus,” but Freestyle Love Supreme is largely divorced from the social critique of conscious rap, which is bound to elicit accusations of “selling out.”

Miranda’s no stranger to that criticism. Last year, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe hosted a staged reading of a new Ishmael Reed play titled The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda. Reed, a 1998 MacArthur “genius” grantee, took umbrage at what he considered Manuel’s ahistorical portrait of Alexander Hamilton, particularly his relationship to slavery. Reed also characterized the rapping in Hamilton as “corny” and derided the commercialism of the show (he was especially peeved that Manuel would do a commercial for American Express).

I did find myself wondering what the show would be like if the guest rapper were, say, Megan Thee Stallion or Black Thought or Erykah Badu and wishing that there was room for them to drop by and bless the audience with some rhymes. The group generally performs two nightly sets; perhaps the late-night one offers opportunities for a little more danger.

Miranda has succeeded in extending the democratization of hip-hop to those looking for a low-stakes foray into the genre and capitalizing upon it (he and Kail are also producers). Podcasters Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton once mused on an episode of Another Round that “improv is white people’s spoken word.” Sprinkle a hint of Lawry’s, and maybe some Goya Adobo, and you’ve got Freestyle Love Supreme.